2 June 2014

At the stroke of midnight on 2 June 2014, the state of Telangana came into existence, the 29th state of the Indian Union, fifty-eight years after the merger it had never consented to, forty-five years after the bullets of 1969, thirteen years after one man founded a party on a single non-negotiable demand. This is the record of the day itself: the midnight of arrival, the first oath, and the beginning of the reconstruction.

The appointed day arrived quietly, as appointed days do, and then it was midnight and everything was different. The Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, passed by Parliament in February and signed by the President on 1 March, took effect at 12.00 AM on 2 June 2014. The rivers, the revenues and the right to self-governance that had been argued over for fifty-eight years were, from that instant, Telangana's own. Across the ten districts, people who had waited their entire lives, and carried the waiting of parents and grandparents who had not lived to see it, came out into the night. Hyderabad lit the Charminar for its newest state. The pink flags of the movement flew from village squares that had sent marchers to every agitation since 1969.

In the elections held two weeks earlier, on 16 May 2014, the people of Telangana had chosen their first government: TRS won 63 of the 119 Assembly seats and 11 of 17 Lok Sabha seats: the party founded in 2001 with one demand receiving the mandate to lead the state that demand had created. At 12.57 PM on formation day, at Raj Bhavan in Hyderabad, K. Chandrasekhar Rao was sworn in as the first Chief Minister of Telangana. The man who had sold his own land to fund the party, who had wagered his life in the hunger strike of 2009, took the oath of office in the state he had promised to deliver.

The Reconstruction Begins

In the first decade of Telangana's existence, the new state government launched Mission Bhagiratha to provide safe drinking water to every household in Telangana, addressing the fluorosis crisis in Nalgonda and the water scarcity that had defined Mahbubnagar and other districts. It launched Rythu Bandhu, providing direct investment support to farmers who had been left entirely to their own resources for five decades. It launched Kaleshwaram, the largest lift irrigation project in the world, to irrigate the lands through which the Krishna and Godavari had flowed without adequately serving Telangana's farmers. It established new universities, new medical colleges, new welfare schemes for Dalits through the Dalit Bandhu programme, for minorities through the Shaadi Mubarak scheme, for women through the Kalyana Lakshmi scheme, and for the poor through the double bedroom housing scheme.

That voice, which KCR had founded a party in 2001 to create, which Prof. Jayashankar had spent a lifetime building the intellectual foundation for, which the people of Telangana had marched for in their millions, was finally, permanently and constitutionally its own. The 29th state of India. The state of Telangana. Free at last to govern itself, to spend its own revenues, to irrigate its own fields, to give its own children the jobs and education that had been denied them for two generations. The long struggle was over. The reconstruction had begun.

← Previous Parliament Votes Next Chapter → Water for Every Field and Home